When we asked him what kind of party he wanted to have, we gave him options (as usual). Tyler struggles to answer open-ended questions still. He usually still has to see the options for cereal to choose his breakfast, for example. And when I asked him if he wanted to go bowling or skating or jumping or sledding, etc, he just looked at me strangely. "For my birthday we go to ice skating and I ride my scooter," he told me matter-of-factly. We've done that two years in a row, so that's just obvious, mommy. (We've tried convincing both kids that there is a difference between ice skating and roller skating, but they've never done ice skating, so they don't believe us yet.)
So skating it is!
I wasn't too upset by his choice, since it isn't too expensive and is fun for all of my in-laws to come and join us. We always have his party as a family party, since those are the people he actually gets excited about seeing. He still doesn't remember his classmates very well, or the kids his age at church. But he knows who Grandma Skarda is, along with most of his cousins.
I asked him if he wanted to try out skates and he gave me a firm "no". When I asked him why, he said "because they are slippery!" I think I will take him back sometime and try to teach him the skates, but for his birthday party I wasn't going to argue with that.
This girl, on the other hand, just wanted to GO. She loved zooming around with Daddy.
I know this picture is horrible- my flash just bounces off the ceiling and the floor in there and makes odd halos as everyone zooms past. But I love that look on her face so much!
I did make one big mistake when we got there. I figured that while I wasn't too busy, I would walk the scooter around for Jasmine for a lap.
And then, she decided that I should be doing that non-stop the rest of the night. This is the face of "MOM! Push!"
She would just sit perched up there and yell at me until I did one more lap. But then one of her cousins came with his little bike. Since he wasn't using it, I asked if Jasmine could try it. She screamed "no!" and continued her tantrum about how I should be pushing her scooter. But then the cousin rode the bike for a few minutes. Suddenly it was a wanted object. She snagged it as soon as he got off and was very proud to ride that thing slowly around the loop over and over and over.
That girl worries me.
Back to the birthday boy. My camera battery died, so we switched to the point and shoot level of photography. I know he looks very bored here, but I promise he was pretty excited about the green cake he picked out with Daddy.
Jasmine was pretty excited too.
For his actual birthday, we went to his favorite place as a family: the pizza buffet. The funny part was that Grandma gave him a Costco- sized box of donut holes and Daddy got him a candy dispenser, so despite not having lunch today, it was still by far the least he has eaten at that place. He didn't even finish his Oreo pizza! Tomorrow I will restrict both of those and try to point him to healthier choices, but today was his birthday, so I had to figure him exempt.
Anyway, the pizza buffet is always a favorite no matter what. And there was a really nice lady there making balloon animals, so that was awesome.
I swear, this is the best picture in a long sequence as I frantically tried to get them all to look at me. For the record, Kaitlyn got a pink and purple T-Rex, Jasmine has a butterfly, and Tyler asked for a green sword.
But now we get to the more interesting part of this post. Eight is a big birthday in the LDS Church because it is the age that most children are baptized. Some parts of this church have been things I have to pray about to see how I feel about them, and some of them are things that have just always made sense to me. And baptizing at an older age like eight has always just made more sense to me than baptizing an infant. We believe that younger children are not held accountable for their "sins" because they are not able to understand right from wrong yet, and therefore do not need to be cleansed yet. To quote from one of the church manuals:
Every person who has reached the age of eight, who understands what is right and what is wrong, and who has faith in Jesus and has repented should be baptized. Children who are younger than eight years old do not need to be baptized. Our Father in Heaven doesn't judge them for what they do. Also, people who are mentally incapable of understanding what is right and what is wrong do not need to be baptized. All other people must be baptized if they want to return to live with our Father in Heaven.
It is an interesting doctrine, and a fairly unique one among Christian churches. There are a lot of scriptures that talk about the importance of baptism in no uncertain terms: "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." Hence, most people make sure that every person is baptized as quickly after birth so they don't take any chances. They wouldn't want to end up like Tess of D'Urbervilles. And at the end of the day, I don't see any real harm in that method, to be honest.
Because the really important part of baptism isn't exactly that you went in the water and came back up. The important part is the choice you make to follow the teachings of Christ. That's a daily decision, not a "once and done" decision. Baptism is required to start that journey, and even if baptism happens before you can truly start that daily work of remembering Him in all that we do, the important part is what we do after our baptism. The important part is renewing that covenant weekly by taking the sacrament and repenting.
But I digress. The part that has always resonated with me is that we don't need to have our sins wiped away if we didn't have any sins yet to begin with. We believe that we are not accountable for Adam's transgressions, or anyone else's actions but our own. So a newborn infant has done nothing that needs to be wiped away. And to me, the act of joining a church - any church - should be a true decision made by the person involved. Hence, a person should be old enough to understand at least the basics of what baptism is before they make that choice.
So for Tyler, the question lay in the fourth sentence of that blue paragraph. Is Tyler mentally capable of understanding what is right and what is wrong? Is he able to understand the choice to join our church? Does he know what baptism symbolizes, and is does he have faith in Jesus Christ?
Unfortunately, after a lot of discussion between ourselves, Tyler, and our Bishop, I think the answer is not yet. I don't think the answer is not ever, or I might just have him baptized anyway if he wanted to. After all, Jesus did not need to be baptized. He was baptized as an example to us, but not because he need to have his sins washed away. But the answer for Tyler is not YET.
Tyler does not yet understand truly the difference between right and wrong. He knows following rules, like how he shouldn't hit someone who takes his toy away, or shouldn't take things that aren't yours. But he has never done anything wrong with the intent to do wrong. If he does something wrong and I ask him who did it, he will say "Tyler". He doesn't lie about it. And when I teach him that it wasn't the right thing to do, he said "oh" sadly, and files that away in his mind. Most of what he gets in trouble for in this house is playing rough with his sisters. He has learned that one of Daddy's ways of showing affection for Tyler (and his sisters, too) is to tackle them and hug them and tickle them. Tyler gets awfully confused when his sisters don't like being hugged and tackled as much as he loves being hugged and tackled.
And Tyler does not yet grasp the concept of faith in Jesus Christ, or that there are other churches out there. Faith is quite the abstract concept, especially regarding things he has never seen, and he still can't pick out breakfast unless he sees the options with his own eyes. But he used to not be able to make a choice even when he could see the options. It took a lot of work for us to get him to understand that he could say words that would impact what happened to him. And before that, it took a lot of work for him to understand how to say the words and what they referred to in the first place. We are progressing. Just not at the same rate as the "average" kid (who I'm not convinced exists).
That's the part I had the hardest time accepting, for a long time. When we first started getting help for Tyler, I remember that the plan was to get him help early on so that he could "catch up". We wanted him to have speech therapy when he was 3 so that he wouldn't be the kid pulled out of class when he was in 3rd grade. In Kindergarten, we were talking about when we could "mainstream" him- when he could rejoin the "regular" class. But slowly I have come to the realization that it probably isn't going to happen. Many Autistic children just need to learn how to communicate and relate to people, and have a mind that is sharp on academics in the meantime. So they once they figure out how to speak and function in society, they can jump right into a classroom.
But that's not Tyler. Tyler has learning disabilities. He has struggled to learn every single thing in life, from latching on to nurse, to walking, to talking, to how to hold a pencil or read or write. In the progress of life, some people learn at at sprint, most of us walk and jog as we go along, and Tyler is just sauntering slowly along at his own speed. That means that instead of getting closer to joining his peers in a classroom, he is getting further and further behind. And as a worried Momma bear, that troubled me a lot.
Slowly, I had to let go of this idea that he would catch up. I had to accept his journey at his own pace. And once I did that, I was at peace with so many other aspects in his life. So what if he can't read yet. It might take other kids a year to learn how to sound out letters into a word, and they might accomplish that by age 5. But that doesn't matter to Tyler and that shouldn't matter to me. We just teach him to read. If that takes him years to accomplish, so be it. If he learns how to write at age 10, that's okay. If he doesn't learn to drive until he's 30, then that's okay.
And if he isn't ready to be baptized at the first moment he is eligible for it, then we will just wait.
We've been talking to him about baptism as much as we can after each baptism that he has gone to see. He has a much easier time with tangible concepts, after all. And the good news is that there are a lot of kids his age in this ward, and as a member of the Primary Presidency I plan to attend every one with my family. There are 16 scheduled for this year, as I recall. So we will have plenty of times this year where we can go and see a baptism and talk to him about it afterward. We aren't holding him back to penalize him, and he doesn't have to answer our quiz questions correctly to move forward. But I want his baptism to mean something to him.
Right now he knows two things about baptism. Up until this week, the only thing he could answer about baptism was that "you go in a pool". And then, after we had talked to the Bishop and cancelled the baptism time that was scheduled for tomorrow morning, this week Tyler said "I am eight years old! That means I get baptized." I felt a pang of regret when he said that. "Am I keeping him back from it? If he wants to be baptized, shouldn't we just do it anyway?" But I realized that his statement was just like when I asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday party. He didn't actually see it as a question. He had heard time and time again in Primary that first you turn eight years old and then you get baptized. He loves "first, then" statements. He loves to know the sequence of events and check things off as you go.
So I don't think we will hold off very long. But I do think we will use all of the baptisms this year to teach him what a baptism truly is and why we do it.
Well, now that I have written a long novel, on to my yearly snapshot:
*Tyler still loves the color green, and is thrilled anytime something has his name on it. I frequently pick through Pottery Barn seconds at a local store- they send things there when they are monogrammed accidentally, so it is just random stuff with random names on it. Sometimes we get lucky, and sure enough one night there was a suitcase with "Tyler" embroidered on it. Daddy and I were debating about it. He already had a suitcase, so did we really want to spend the money? But Tyler had no intention of leaving it at the store. It had his name on it, so clearly it belonged to him. He didn't want to let it go at the cash register, let alone leave it behind!
*Tyler is still our loving kid who goes along with everything . . almost. He is starting to stick up for himself more and more! He even gets after Jasmine sometimes, which is rare. Usually he would laugh his head off if that girl hit him in the face. (I wish I was kidding about that.) But the other day she was messing up his carefully built lego creation and he told us "you get that baby out of here!" While it is sweet that Tyler has always gone along with what life brings him, it is good for him developmentally to stick up for himself and vocalize his preferences in life.
*Tyler LOVES playing games on my old Kindle. Right now his favorites are Candy Crush and Plants vs Zombies, because that is what he sees mommy and daddy playing. He would play those all day long if I let him.
*And most of all, we love Tyler, and Tyler adores all of us! He is such a sweet, happy influence in our lives, for which I am truly grateful.
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